Speakers

Laszlo Bock

Laszlo is most recognized for his ground-breaking work as SVP of People Operations at Google, where he served as a core member of Google’s management team. He is credited with creating the field of “People Analytics,” the application of academic-quality rigor and Google-paced innovation. Laszlo wrote the NYT best-selling Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google to Transform How You Live and Lead. He also founded Humu.com.

Laszlo will speak to Growth Summit participants about his blueprint for a new kind of HR.

Originally from Vancouver, Rahim is a founder of several B2B software companies, including Involver, an enterprise social media platform, which was acquired by Oracle. Post sale, he spent nearly three years helping to build the Oracle Marketing Cloud, and supporting the global field, inside sales and product development organizations. Rahim is now the CEO of SVAcademy, a future of work platform, which is funded by Bloomberg, and provides pre-trained entry-level sales talent to Silicon Valley's fastest growing SaaS companies.

While in high school back in Canada, Rahim founded a web hosting company, which he sold for $1.5m (without telling his parents). He completed his MBA at the Ivey School of Business, where he was the first student accepted without a pre-requisite undergraduate degree.

Derrick Fung is CEO and Co-founder of Drop - an intelligent mobile rewards app where consumers can earn points for every day spending on top of their existing debit and credit cards. Drop has ranked in the top 3 in the app store in both Canada and the US and currently boasts 3 million members. Drop has raised over $25m from VCs including NEA, Sierra Ventures, White Star Capital, CapitalOne Growth Ventures and angel investors such as Tina Sharkey (CEO of Brandless) and Dan Macklin (Co-founder of SoFi).

Derrick began his career in Finance in Sales & Trading in Toronto and New York at various investment banks including Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas and CIBC Capital Markets. Derrick was named in 2014 to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Music alongside Avicii, Lady Gaga and Drake.

Shuman is CTO of Shape Security, ranked by Deloitte as the #1 fastest-growing company in Silicon Valley and named by Fortune as one of the leading AI companies globally. Shape’s platform defends the world’s largest banks, airlines, and federal agencies against sophisticated cybercrime and prevented over $1 billion in fraud last year.

Shuman was previously global head of product for Trust & Safety at Google. He joined Google in 2003 as one of the early product managers for AdSense and helped launch Gmail. Shuman also co-founded and is chairman of TeachAids, a global nonprofit spun out of Stanford, which provides research-based health education to over 500 million people in 82 countries. He is a regular guest lecturer at Stanford on entrepreneurship and scaling organizations. A graduate of UWO and MIT, he was named by the Boston Globe to their MIT150 list of the top innovators in the history of MIT.

Andrew Graham is co-founder and CEO of Borrowell, a financial technology company that helps consumers make great decisions about credit. Borrowell was the first company in Canada to offer credit scores for free and has grown to be one of the country’s largest fintech companies, with approaching a million users. Borrowell has won numerous awards, including being named one of the top 100 fintech companies in the world by KPMG.

Andrew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MA in economics from the University of Edinburgh. He was recently named a finalist for the Ontario region for EY's Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Mark is Founder & CEO of Terrain Advisors, which provides competitive talent intelligence for Talent Acquisition and Executive Recruiting services, and serves as a Fund Advisor and Co-Founder at SignalFire, an early stage venture capital fund.

Previously Mark served as a senior Partner at True Search (the fastest growing Executive Search firm in the US), where served on the executive committee, led the 25 person San Francisco office, and helped the company scale from 20 people to over 120 in 4 years. Mark previously founded Ignition Talent Group, a data-driven talent acquisition firm that helped high-growth companies recruit elite executives. Earlier in his career, Mark earned a reputation as a top performer at leading multi-national and boutique search firms, including Korn/Ferry, Futurestep, and James & Co., as well as Barlow Group, where he served as a partner. Mark began his career at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. Mark earned a B.A. in English from Tufts University and has completed graduate coursework at UCLA and UC Berkeley.

Irfhan Rawji is the Founder & CEO of MobSquad, an innovative Canadian start-up that aims to repatriate Canadian software developers and keep new STEM graduates from leaving Canada as well as attract new immigrants to Canada by creating domestic career opportunities for software developers that did not formerly exist.

Irfhan is also a Principal with Totem Capital Corporation, a private capital firm focused on investing in Canadian small businesses, and is a Venture Partner with Relay Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm exclusively focused on mobile computing with offices in Toronto and Menlo Park. Irfhan is also an Adjunct Professor at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia where he teaches in the areas of finance, public policy, strategy and leadership.

Oleg is the CEO and founder of People.ai, one of YCombinators "Top 100 Companies". Previously, Oleg helped start and scale three big data companies, two of which, including Oleg’s own Semantria, were subsequently acquired. He has a passion for data science, machine learning and text analytics. At People.ai, Oleg is leveraging these technologies to solve the age-old problem of measuring and optimizing human productivity. Oleg will discuss his strategy for spinning up a world-class enterprise sales team, one of the most elusive and competitive talent puzzles that startups face.

Michelle is co-founder and COO of Cloudflare, a web performance and security company that was named to CNBC’s Disruptor 50 List, selected by the Wall Street Journal as the Most Innovative Internet Technology Company for two successive years, and named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.

Before co-founding Cloudflare, Michelle held positions at Google and Toshiba and launched two successful startups. She holds a BS degree, with distinction, from McGill University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship. Michelle has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, one of the Top 15 Women to Watch in Tech by Inc. magazine, and a 40 Under 40 leader by San Francisco Business Times. She was also featured as one of the Women Who Rule Silicon Valley in a recent issue of ELLE magazine.

Tech titan Michele Romanow is an engineer and a serial entrepreneur who started five companies before her 33rd birthday. A "Dragon" on CBC's hit show Dragons' Den, Michele is the co-founder of Clearbanc, which gave entrepreneurs more than $100M in funding this year. She previously co-founded SnapSaves, which was acquired by American tech giant, Groupon. Michele was also the co-Founder of Buytopia.ca, which acquired ten competitors including Shop.ca and WagJag and was ranked #3 on the Profit Hot 50 list of fastest growing companies. She's ranked in WXN's "100 Most Powerful in Canada" and listed as the only Canadian on Forbes magazine's "Millennial on a Mission" list. Michele is a prolific angel investor and the winner of Angel Investor of the Year award.

Brittany Forsyth is the Senior Vice President of Talent at Shopify and has been in this role since 2014. She has been with the company since 2010 and previously served as the Director of HR. Brittany is actively involved with a number of HR organizations across North America.

Brittany obtained a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Carleton University.

As Chief Business Officer at Instacart, Nilam Ganenthiran leads Instacart’s efforts to develop sustainable partnerships with retailers, consumer packaged good manufacturers, content providers, payment processors and other technology start-ups. Under Nilam’s leadership, Instacart has grown from a 10-person start-up with 100 personal shoppers across San Francisco to its position today as the largest same-day grocery service in North America, serving more than 300 grocers across the United States and Canada with more than 70,000 personal shoppers.

SVP, People and Culture at Wave - An Alchemist of Organizations, Ashira works to turn potential into performance through Purpose, Values and Great Leadership. A transformational executive and a change advocate; she blends a get-it-done performance style with the ability to bring a vision to life and fuels enterprise-wide execution that drives employee engagement, retention, revenue, and growth.

Currently 100% focused on building a world class, award winning team driving exponential growth at Wave, she previously led the scale and optimization of Vision Critical’s global operations through 300% growth and implemented an end-to-end government-level human resources transformation for the Government of Poarch Creek Indians.

Jen's career has been focused on team building in rapid-growth companies, which she continues to do as Head of Talent at GGV Partners where she helps CEOs from Seed to late-stage on key talent searches and strategies.

Jen previously led talent at Highland Capital, and Executive Search at Facebook where she built out the engineering executive search team in addition to hiring technical leaders across the company. Originally from Kanata, Jen is a graduate of Boston College and has an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.

Jen will discuss her playbook for executing a successful executive search, avoiding common pitfalls, and building a world-class team.

Frederic Lalonde is the CEO and Co-Founder of Hopper, the smart way to book travel on your phone. Combining massive amounts of data and advanced machine learning algorithms, Hopper predicts and analyzes airfare and accommodation to save users money and enable them to travel more often.

Fred previously co-founded Newtrade Technologies, which was acquired by Expedia in 2002. As a VP at Expedia, Frederic was responsible for developing the Direct Connect product strategy and signing up over 10,000 hotels to the Expedia platform, including major brands such as Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, Carlson, Cendant and Choice Hotels. He later moved on to participate in various Expedia M&A activities, including the acquisition of Hotels.com, TripAdvisor and eLong.

O’Neill was most recently Chairman, President & CEO of Evernote, where he orchestrated a successful turnaround of the company. Prior to Evernote, Chris held a variety of executive-level roles at Google, coaching multiple teams to success. As managing director of Google Canada, he oversaw all aspects of Google’s operations in Canada and served on the Americas’ Executive Management Group.

O’Neill is a board member of Gap Inc. (NYSE: GPS) and former board member of Tim Hortons (NYSE: THI), Shop.org, and the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA). He is currently a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), a Charter Member of the C100, and a former member of the Canadian Council for Chief Executives (CCCE).

Ray Reddy is currently the co-founder & CEO of Ritual - the order ahead app that taps networks of co-workers and colleagues for fast and easy pick up and pay at a wide variety of local restaurants and coffee shops. With Ritual, users can mobile order and pay at all their favorite local eateries and coffee shops and have it ready to pick up when they arrive.

Prior to Ritual, Ray co-founded mobile commerce company PushLife that was acquired by Google in 2011. At Google, Ray led mobile product management for shopping and commerce. It was while at Google that Ray saw the potential to better leverage a social application to unlock mobile commerce and thus, Ritual was born.

Melissa joined NEA as a Partner in 2015. She focuses on talent acquisition at the executive level across the NEA portfolio. Melissa brings broad operating experience from the technology and healthcare sectors, along with a passion for cultivating relationships, to seek out best in class people who will build life-changing companies that have global reach.

Melissa began her career in technology at Qualcomm (supply chain management), Hewlett Packard (global contract manufacturing strategy) and Netopia (strategic technology alliances). She then transitioned to healthcare, as President of Drip Drop, Inc. (an oral rehydration product for hospital and home use) and realized her passion for creatively improving human health and lives through access to technology solutions. She subsequently joined Khosla Ventures as an Operating Partner focused on finding the best people to advance cutting edge companies at the intersection of technology and life sciences.